A review of Israel’s wars since 1947 (Part 1 of 3)

This is the first of a three-part recap of Israel’s wars since 1947.

Israel has had numerous wars since 1947 that obviously have had a huge effect on how the Israeli public and its politicians think about war. There have been many squandered chances to develop a lasting resolution of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, which has been a continuing thread through that entire period.

The current war, which has no end in sight, is easily the longest intensive conventional military conflict in which Israel has engaged. (Not counting the two periods of popular militance known as intifadas, which can’t reasonably be counted as wars.) So a look back at them provides some relevant perspective on the current disaster.

Civil War in Mandatory Palestine 1947-48.

This is the period where the Zionist forces scrambled to gain control over as much of the territory of British Mandatory Palestine and drive out as many Palestinians as they could in preparation for UN recognition of Israel’s independence. It was at the end of November 1947 when the UN General Assembly adopted a partition plan for separate Jewish and Palestinian states. Britain had turned formal authority for Mandatory Palestine over to the United Nations in February 1947.

War of Independence 1948-49.

Dieter Vieweger observes, „At that time, both parties to the conflict were preparing for a violent implementation of their goals. The UN's partition plan was certainly conceived as being honest and mediating - but unfeasible without the military presence of a force of law and order.” (1)

David Ben-Gurion, was the leader of the Zionist armed forces Haganah and later the first Prime Minister of Israel, declared Israeli independence on May 14, 1848. Haganah during this war also allied (secretly) with the Zionist terrorist groups Irgun and Lehi, who concentrated on terror against civilians. Haganah was renamed the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) later that same month and began to absorb the Irgun and Lehi fighters.

The civil war and the War of Independence created what is still known as the “refugee problem.”

British-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt 1956-57, aka, the Suez Crisis (Oct-Nov 1956).

Israel teamed with the two main formal colonial powers in that region, Britain and France, to seize control over the Suez Canal from Egypt and to overthrow the government of Egypt President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who advocated for an “Arab socialism” and unity among Arab nations in conflict with the West (“Pan-Arabism”. This was a case where Israel was not only representing its own aims but could also legitimately be said to be acting on behalf of Western imperial powers.

But US President Dwight Eisenhower was not on board for this particular action. He applied strong pressure on Israel, Britain, and France to pull back and give up their war aims. This became to be an important turning point in British-US relations, after which Britain became very reluctant to take political positions contrary to those of the US in international conflict, a posture still very much on display decades later when British Labor Prime Minister Tony Blair enthusiastically backed the Cheney-Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq.

The US also required Israel to remove its forces from the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip. Unconditional support for Israeli military adventures was still in the future.

Six-Day War of 1967.

This was the war in which Israel seized the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and have since maintained what is still called an illegal occupation, though it’s very clear that the Israeli government intends to hold those areas permanently with a view to incorporating them into Greater Israel, or “Eretz” Israel. Such control is a part of the official program of the governing coalition of Benjamin Netanyahu’s current government. They want permanent control of that area, also known as “from the river to the sea.”

Avner Cohen wrote on the 50th anniversary of that war:

Fifty years ago, war transformed the Middle East. Six memorable days, known to Israelis as the Six-Day War and to Arabs and others as the 1967 War, redrew the region’s landscape in fundamental ways. In those six days, Israel defeated three Arab armies, gained territory four times its original size, and became the preeminent military power in the region. The war transformed Israel from a nation that perceived itself as fighting for survival into an occupier and regional powerhouse.

The consequences for the Arab coalition were similarly transformative. For those “on the line of confrontation,” as Arab states bordering Israel were called, the war brought the loss of vast territories and crushing humiliation, all the more so for the Palestinians. Gamal Abdel Nasser, President of Egypt and the most prominent Arab leader at the time, survived the war but his leadership never recovered. The stunning defeat initiated the demise of his brand of secular pan-Arabism that was once an assertive ideological force in the Arab world. [my emphasis] (2)

This had big political significance in the US, because the Israelis won widespread admiration from the American public for their quick victory – something that clearly was not happening in the Vietnam War which was still going on. One particular dark side of that was that American Christian fundamentalists came to embrace the Christian Zionist view that looked forward to wars involving Israel as signs of the End Times. And, in a not-unrelated effect, some racist white Americans saw Israel as a nation of white people fighting dark-skinned barbarian Arabs.

Christian Zionism in the form of a “dispensational premillennialism” End Times theology was pioneered by the sectarian Anglo-Irish minister John Nelson Darby (1800-1882) was one of the most important influences in the development of what came to be known as Christian fundamentalism, which is generally the outlook of the political Christian Right in the US. It has now grown to be a major political influence in the Republican Party that celebrates warlike behavior on Israel’s part. The Christians United for Israel group led by John Hagee is one of the most important lobbying and political-mobilizing organizations in US politics.

Hagee told Bill Moyers back in 2007, that it is a “fact that in history, if Jerusalem is at war, the world is at war. If there's peace in Jerusalem there's peace in the world.” (3) Whether uncritically backing Israel’s wars is the best way for the US to bring peace to Jerusalem or anywhere else is not at all as clear to most people as it is to Christian Zionists like Hagee.

Yom Kippur War of 1973.

Israel’s reputation as an invincible nation of warriors was shaken by the 1973 war, which occasioned what was known as the Arab Oil Embargo (1973-74) that made OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) part of the American political vocabulary. Israel was attacked on the Yom Kippur holiday on October 6 by Egypt and Syria. But Israel emerged as the clear winner, though the heroic reputation that IDF Gen. Moshe Dayan had earned in the Six-Day War was tarnished be the setbacks the IDF suffered in the early part of the Yom Kippur Was, to the point that he resigned his command. (4) The enemy had pulled off an attack that caught the Israelis by surprise. (So October 7, 2023 was not the first time that happened.)

Not least through the efforts of the Carter Administration, Israel began a peace process with Egypt culminating in a treaty in 1979 that actually did produce decent relations and maintained the peace between Israel and Egypt, though the still-not-settled Palestinians question was not improved by that reconciliation.

There followed a period ofn attempts by the Palestine Liberation Organization under Yassir Arafat to pressure Israel. But though the Israeli government always blames the Other Side for the lack of progress, Israeli politics was taking a more revanchist turn, and former Irgun terrorist leader Menachem Begin became prime minister. After a 1980 attack by Iran on an Iraqi nuclear research center near its capital Baghdad failed to do serious damage, Begin ordered a much more effective strike in 1981.

Notes:

(1) Vieweger, Dieter (2023): Streit um das Heilige Land (8th edition), 169. Munich: Gütersloher Verlagshaus. My translation from German.

(2) Cohen, Avner (2017): The 1967 Six-Day War. Wilson Center. <https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/the-1967-six-day-war> (Accessed: 2024-22-09).

(3 Hagee, John (2007): Bill Moyers Journal 10/08/2007. <https://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/10052007/transcript1.html> (Accessed: 2024-22-09).